Board of Directors

National Governing Board

Alan SafranChair

Mr. Safran has a 24 year career in public education, that followed 10+ years of other work. In the public education sector, Mr. Safran served for 9 years as a leading official of the Massachusetts Department of Education, including a period as the Deputy Commissioner of Education for the state. He spent 12 years at Match Education, 9 years as the Executive Director of the Match Schools in Boston, MA, and over three years as the leader for the tutor dissemination work at Match Education. In the 1980s, he was a staff member of two United States Senate committees on foreign policy, and an Assistant DA in Queens, NY. He has a BA from Princeton University and a JD from the George Washington University National Law Center, is certified as school superintendent in MA, and is a member of the Bar of NY and MA.

Antonio GutierrezVice Chair

Mr. Gutierrez graduated from Union College with a full educational scholarship through the Posse Foundation. After graduating from Union in 2010, he served as a City Year corps member in Boston, MA, then joined Match Education in 2011 to launch the tutor dissemination unit with Alan Safran, where he focused on cultivating and establishing school and district partnerships and supporting the start-up and implementation of the program at all partner locations. Currently, Mr. Gutierrez is pursuing his MBA in Public and Non-profit Management at Boston University Questrom School of Business (evening division) and is a board member of Summer Search Boston.

Jared Taillefer

Mr. Taillefer is the co-founder and CEO of Great Oaks Charter School in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Boston University in 2005 with a degree in Applied Mathematics. He was a member of the 2005-2006 MATCH Corps, the flagship site for high-dosage tutoring. After serving as at tutor, he taught high school and middle school math and served as the Dean of Students at Match Middle School.

Karl Reid

Dr. Karl W. Reid was named executive director of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) on June 2, 2014, marking his return to the organization that gave him his first major leadership experience, 32 years earlier. For the past 18 years, he has been a leading advocate for increasing college access and opportunity for low-income and minority youth.

Dr. Reid came to NSBE from the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), where he oversaw new program development, research and capacity building for the organization’s 37 historically black colleges and universities and held the title of senior vice president for research, innovation and member college engagement. Before his service at UNCF, he worked in positions of progressive responsibility to increase diversity at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which he left as associate dean of undergraduate education and director of the Office of Minority Education. While working at MIT, Dr. Reid earned his Doctor of Education degree at Harvard University. His dissertation explored the interrelationship of race, identity and academic achievement.

Dr. Reid was born in the Bronx, N.Y., and grew up in Roosevelt, N.Y., a mostly working-class, AfricanAmerican community on Long Island. The high value his parents placed on education, and his admission to a well-resourced, magnet high school near Roosevelt, put him on a track to follow his older brother to MIT, where he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in materials science and engineering and was a Tau Beta Pi Scholar. He credits his membership in the NSBE chapter at MIT with giving a vital boost to his selfconfidence and leadership skills. He joined the Society during his freshman year, was elected chapter vice president his junior year and subsequently served as NSBE national chair for 1984–85.
After graduating from MIT, Dr. Reid worked in the computer industry for 12 years, in product management, marketing, sales and consulting. In 1991, five years into a successful career in sales and marketing with IBM Corporation, Dr. Reid read Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities,” a seminal book about educational disparities in the U.S., which sparked his passion for bringing about positive change through education of African Americans.

Dr. Reid sits on the DC STEM Council, and holds memberships in the American Association of Engineering Societies, the American Society of Engineering Education, and the American Society of Association Executives. He was recently named a Top 100 Executives in America by Uptown Professional magazine.
Dr. Reid is now supporting NSBE’s National Executive Board and the Society’s 16,000 active members in reaching the main goal of NSBE’s 10-year Strategic Plan: to end the underrepresentation of blacks in engineering in the U.S. by producing 10,000 black engineers per year in the country, by 2025.

Meredith LiuTreasurer

Ms. Liu is the President and CEO of The Primary School, a new health and education model in E Palo Alto, CA founded by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. She earned her BA in Economics from Dartmouth College, magna cum laude, and completed her MBA, with distinction, at Harvard Business School (HBS). Previously, she served as the managing director of the School Turnaround Group (STG) at Mass Insight – a research, policy, and consulting organization dedicated to fundamentally transforming the state and local education systems that serve our country’s lowest performing schools. She was also a management consultant at Bain and Company and a dean and board member at Codman Academy, a high performing charter high school in Boston. She has consulted for a variety of education organizations, including charter management organizations, non-profits, school districts, and state education agencies. In addition, she was the Chief Financial Officer of Match Education. Ms. Liu is a visiting Education Research Fellow at Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank that explores and promotes the principles of disruptive innovation.

Tony Luckett

Tony Luckett is the Head of Business at Leap.ai, a “career companion” focused on helping professionals discover amazing opportunities while learning about their own passions and abilities. As a long-time “Education Guy”, Tony has dedicated his life to making others successful – first as a school leader in the Marshall Islands, a HS math teacher at Match Education in Boston and recently as Head of Education for Piazza. He has experience in human centered design (d.School and as a Business Designer at IDEO.org) and enjoys hiking.
He holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and two bachelors from Dartmouth College (mechanical engineering and sculpture).